Planning for retirement

New findings from NCDS show there is stark variation in how your generation has been able to prepare financially for later life.

As many as one in six study members don’t have a private pension of their own or sizeable savings (more than £25k) to bolster their State Pension. While women are only a little less likely than men to have a private pension, their pension pots are a lot smaller on average.

What we asked you

When we caught up with you for the Life in Your Early 60s Survey, you answered a range of questions about your work, income, pensions and savings as well as about your expectations for the future.

Our researchers analysed the information you shared, along with your answers to questions in earlier surveys. They looked at how you have been preparing for retirement and how your life experiences relate to this.

Who retired early and who was still working?

By your early 60s, a quarter of you had fully retired. Just over half of you (53%) were in paid work. Others were out of work but not yet retired (23%), with illness being the main reason.

This is what you told us you were doing in your early 60s:

Employed full time: 25%
Fully retired: 24%
Employed part time: 14%
Sick: 12%
Self-employed full time: 9%
Caring for someone: 7%
Self-employed part time: 5%
Unemployed: 2%
Other: 2%

You had different expectations about when you would retire. Those of you who had mainly been self-employed were much more likely to say you would keep working until 68 or older than those who had mostly been in paid employment (40% versus 14%).

Most of you knew the State Pension age for your generation was 66 but more than a third of you did not know how much you would receive.

Compared to those still working, those of you who had already retired were around twice as likely to:

• have household savings of over £100,000
• own your own home outright
• have a defined benefit or ‘final salary’ style pension, paying out a secure income.

Who had a private pension?

Most of you (four in five) had a workplace or other private pension. But nearly one in 10 didn’t have a pension or any household savings to fall back on either.

Women had accumulated much smaller private pensions on the whole. The average value of defined contribution pensions held by female study members was £28,500. For men, it was three times this amount at £90,000.

Almost half of you (45%) told us you had your own pension and lived with a partner or spouse who had one too. But in comparison, 15% of you reported that neither you nor your partner had a pension.

Those of you who had been self-employed most of your lives were three times less likely than salaried workers to have a private pension.

What about household savings?

A third of you said you had less than £25,000 in savings, and a further one in six (16%) had no savings at all. A quarter of you had saved up £25,000 or more but less than £100,000, and the remaining quarter reported savings of £100,000 or more.

Those of you with no household savings were more likely to be single, divorced or widowed than married or in a civil partnership.

How does health relate to retirement plans?

Those of you who didn’t have a pension were more likely to have had a longstanding limiting illness or mental ill health at some point during your lives than those with a pension.

Just over half (51%) without a pension reported at least one period of limiting ill health and a third (33%) reported poor mental health at some point in adult life. Among those of you with a pension, the numbers were lower – around a quarter (24%) had experienced longstanding limiting ill health and one in five (20%) had experienced symptoms of depression.

Why this research matters

These NCDS findings highlight some big disparities in people’s finances in the run up to State Pension age. In particular, women had much smaller pension pots, potentially leaving some financially vulnerable in retirement.

Since 2012, employers have had a legal duty to enrol their staff in a workplace pension, to help more people to save enough for retirement. This important NCDS research will enable the government to see whether the gender pension gap reduces for younger generations.

Read the full research paper

This research was commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions.

Visit the Government website to read the full report, Pensions and economic status among the 1958 birth cohort prior to reaching State Pension age, by Vanessa Moulton, Sam Parsons, Bozena Wielgoszewska, and George Ploubidis (February 2026).